Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16

Grieg was twenty-five when he wrote the concerto in the summer of 1868, spent in Denmark with his wife Nina and their small daughter; two friends rented him a cottage with a piano on Zealand so that he could work undisturbed. Behind it stands Schumann's concerto, which he had heard Clara Schumann play in Leipzig at fifteen. He failed to finish the score in time to play the premiere himself; Edmund Neupert gave it in Copenhagen in April 1869. Grieg went on revising the orchestration until the last year of his life. Neupert's premiere fell on 3 April 1869, with Holger Simon Paulli conducting the Royal Danish Orchestra. The concerto was also the first of its kind to be recorded: a 1909 disc compressed it to some six minutes.